Various developments of my (i.e.,
Sunthar's) first paper on TS, presented to the Assembly of the World's Religions (New York,
1984), the focus of which is the relationship between
tradition and transgression: how are these two antipodes held together within
the same religio-cultural transmission and shared symbolic system. All our
other papers on comparative religion are, in a profound sense, derived from
the insights in this seminal essay. This page also offer sections from
Elizabeth's various papers that deal from the same perspective with topics
like the 'opposition' between the 'orthodox' Brahm and the antinomian
Bhairava, the transition from Vedic 'dualism' through Hindu 'trinity' to
'tribal' shamanism, brahmanical patriarchy and goddess-cults, etc.

This single note (#7) from the
Introduction to my Ph.D. thesis, relegated to a
catch-all Appendix, suffices to demonstrate both the value of structuralism as
a heuristic methodology and its woolly pretensions as a philosophy. Georges
Dumzil (who had already expressed his own reservations...) had lent my thesis
to his colleague Lvi-Strauss and encouraged us to meet the latter on my
second visit to Paris in the mid-80's. Lvi-Strauss received us seated
serenely in the Olympian heights of the Collge de France, and stated that he
had carefully read the whole thesis with appreciation. However, he steadfastly
countered my attempts to engage him in a re-analysis of the cycle of the
"repressed laughter"--implying quite obviously that he had
completely missed the real message of these myths--by affirming "cela n'tait pas mon propos"
(i.e., he had not been attempting to do the same thing). For more parallels
between Vedic-Hindu and Amerindian mythology, see the
all-devouring fire.

Presented to the Sixth
International Conference-Seminar of Tamil Studies, November 15-19, 1987, at
the Universiti Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, this paper is in essence a
constructive review of David Dean Shulman's Tamil Temple Myths: Sacrifice
and Divine Marriage in the South Indian Saiva Tradition (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1980). Far from being
specific to Tamil Nadu (or even South India), the motifs unearthed by Shulman
correspond to a pan-Indian paradigm of the incorporation of local goddesses by
the brahmanical/Agamic tradition. Attempts are also not lacking to exploit
this cultural history to reaffirm womens' liberation from patriarchal values;
see, for example, read "Marriage
as Reaffirming Sacred Space by Maheshvari Naidu" by Maheshvari Naidu.

The concluding paper to Alf Hiltebeitel, ed.,
Criminal Gods and Demon Devotees: Essays on the Popular Guardians of Hinduism
(Albany: SUNY Press, 1989), pp.427 -462, it comments on practically all the
other papers and (re-) interprets their findings from the perspective of
transgressive sacrality. Beware! - style is very laconic (often provocative...especially
given the context) and many of the asides could do with more systematic
elaboration.

Anklamman

The Perverse Humor of the Infantile Vidshaka

Elizabeth and I were active participants in several
seminars at Harvard, among which our favorite was the Buddhist Studies Forum,
perhaps because most of the members were very sympathetic towards, if not
personally engaged with, the religious tradition they were studying.
Unfortunately, there seemed to be little coordination with seminar series in
other departments on ethnic conflict in South Asia, on regional cultural
histories in the Indian subcontinent, on death and dying from a global
perspective, etc. The questions addressed to Buddhism in this proposal could
even begin to be answered only in an inter-disciplinary cross-cultural
context. Our own initial attempt to address them within an Indic perspective
may be seen in "Between Lhasa and Benares:
Pachali Bhairab of Katmandu (Towards an Acculturation Model of Hindu-Buddhist
Relations), which was presented on 5th Nov. 1991 to the Harvard Buddhist
Studies Forum.

Between Srinagar and Benares: Kashmir's Contribution towards a
Synthesis of Indian Culture (1991)

Notes for the lecture given
to the seminars organized by Prof. Michael Witzel on the Cultural History of
Kashmir and Nepal. The pre-supposition behind the seminar
series was that Indian culture could best be reconstituted not at a "national"
level but on a region-by-region basis. Despite the focus on Kashmiri Shaivism,
the approach is a processual one that outlines a cumulative history from
Buddhism to Hinduism to Islam. I'd be happy to work with any scholar willing
develop this into a full-fledged monograph faithful to the spirit of this
outline.

The 'prospectus' for the course on transgressive
sacrality that I taught at the Experimental College of Tuft's University. It
was a challenge - with mixed results - to get undergraduate students with no
prior background up to speed on these rather abstract ideas.

My
seminal paper concluded with the interrogation: "In view of the
apparent absence of a transgressive dimension in Judaic sacrality, our Jewish
friends could perhaps elucidate those features and structures of Judaism that
would have tended to exclude such a dimension." So, you may
well imagine my apprehension when I learned not too long before catching our
flight from Benares to New York for the Assembly of the World's Religions,
that the coordinator of my group-sessions on "Spiritual Disciplines and
Practices" was the head of a Florida Jewish congregation. To my pleasant
surprise, he welcomed my talk by declaring that few (even Jews) were aware of
the important role that TS had played in the Jewish tradition, to the extent
that in the 16th C. more than 90% of world Jewry hailed the 'heretical'
Sabbatai Sevi as long-awaited Messiah. Rabbi Rami Shapiro, who had previously
studied under (and to be) a Zen Buddhist master, enthusiastically introduced
me to Gershom Scholem and (what he called) "Jewish Tantra." Scholem has been
for me not just a confirmation of the validity of a dialectical approach to
Indian religious traditions, but also a means of universalizing TS to embrace
the Abrahamic traditions.

When Charles Mopsik subsequently got to know my work as
a result of his collaboration with Elizabeth for Between Jerusalem and
Benares, he drew my attention to the abiding role of TS already in ancient
Judaism and scrupulously retained within subsequent Kabbalistic (and other)
orthodoxy (as opposed to the apostate Sabbatians and Frankists). In the course
of our personal interactions over several enjoyable Parisian summers, he
introduced me to several other specialists of Judaism, some of whom
(particularly Moshe Idel) were challenging the validity of Scholem's attempt
to 'radicalize' Jewish history from a (crypto-) Sabbatian perspective. After
moving to Boston in late 1989, my exchanges with Jewish scholars quickly
extended to other areas of Judaism, and made this collective volume feasible.

Though Sunthar grew up in Muslim Malaysia, his
scholarly interest in Islam was really awakened as a result of his
subsequent involvement with Elizabeth's field work in Benares on the
pillar-cult of Lt-Bhairava, whose annual cosmogonic marriage was in earlier
times celebrated by both lower-caste Hindus and Muslim weavers, as attested
by the Muslim custodians of the surrounding prayer-ground (dgh),
whom we interviewed in 1980? with John Irwin, the English expert on (pre-)
Ashokan pillars, and with a former Indian student of D.D. Kosambi. We
subsequently began researching the parallel cult of Ghazi Miyan in
conjunction with the historiography of the 'unprecedented' Hindu-Muslim 'War
of the Lt' of 1809, and had agreed to contribute a chapter on this topic to
a collective volume on
Living Banaras: Hindu Religion in Cultural Contextbeing then edited by two geographers, Bradley P. Hertel
and Rana P.B. Singh (at Banaras Hindu University). On our first visit to the
US in 1985, we were visited at the Assembly of the World's Religions by
William Eastman, the Director of SUNY Press, and took it upon ourselves to
visit Bradley at Charlottesville (Virginia). Not only did we facilitate
publication of
Living Benares by SUNY, we also actively solicited contributions from
colleagues such as Mary Searle-Chatterjee, whose paper on "Mythologizing the
Past" (which covers Ghz Miy in Banaras) was published in the volume.

Sometime in 1990/91, subsequent to our move to
Cambridge (Mass.), we were informed by the editors (Cynthia A. Humes now
having replaced Rana P. B. Singh as co-editor) that SUNY Press had rejected
our existing draft as too inflammatory on account of its focus on
Hindu-Muslim conflict. Exploratory as it still was, our research already
seemed to suggest that the religious controversy that led to the 1809
felling of the Bhairava-pillar offered key insights into Hindu-Muslim
relations especially at a time when similar issues were just beginning to be
raised around the Rm Janma Bhmi (but without the benefit of distance). Not
only did we not receive any specific criticisms from the referees (which
we'd have been glad to take into consideration), SUNY made the exclusion of
our paper the condition for publication of the volume, thus leaving our
friendly editors no choice.

Undeterred, Sunthar pursued his researches into the
syncretic aspects of the Ghz Miyan cult in which he received much help
from scholars of Islam (particularly at Harvard), including Muslims like Ali
Asani (chair in Indo-Islamic studies) and Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr (son of the
famous Seyyed Hossein Nasr), expert in Islamic fundamentalism in South Asia,
all of whom read the draft. He was invited by C.M. Naim,
professor of Urdu and chair of the South Asia Dept. at the Univ. of Chicago
to deliver in April 91 the principal arguments to an audience including Gyan Pandey, who
had already published his book on communalism whose approach is supposedly
validated by his analyses of these riots (in chapter 1). Our growing
monograph underwent fission to produce a separate paper on Hindu-Muslim
syncretism that Sunthar sent to Islam and the Modern Age offering to
revise it per their critique and requirements. The only response we got was
a bundle with a large number of off-prints of the already published paper
(see below)!

Readers may now judge for themselves whether
Between Mecca and Benares inflames Hindu-Muslim animosity or ever
intended to do so. Non-publication of the paper did not prevent the Babri
Masjid from being destroyed, leaving widespread Hindu-Muslim rioting in its
wake, and the Vishvanth temple/Aurangzeb mosque complex has become the
renewed focus of competing religious claims. History repeats itself,
especially when it's not allowed to ask itself the really hard, basic and
obvious questions!

Submitted
under the title "Death and Sexuality in Hinduism and Islam:
The Marriage of Lt Bhair and Ghz Miy,"
but
published with the above title in Islam and the Modern Age,
Vol. XXIV no.1, February 1993
(Zakir Husain Institute of Islamic Studies, Jamia Milia
Islamia, Jamia Nagar, New Delhi), pp.20-69. Except for some minor corrections, this online version is
exactly the same as the (otherwise not easily available) published text. Read Elizabeth's
"Bhairava: Ktwl of Vrnas" first for an analysis and interpretation of
the cult of Lt Bhairo, before sinking your teeth
into this exercise in comparative religion (Hinduism and Islam) based on
religious syncretism at the 'folk' level. The
straightforward argumentation in this paper provides the best springboard
into the complex meanderings of the
monograph proper
entitled Between Mecca and Benares
.

Whereas "The Marriage of Lt Bhair and Ghz Miy"
looked at Hindu-Muslim interaction from the perspective of religious
syncretism, here I attempt to interpret their socio-political relations. It
is also my initial contribution to the analysis of 'communal' conflict in
India.

This paper was published in Visualizing
Space in Banaras: Images, maps, and other representations,
edited by Martin Gaenszle and Jrg
Gengnagel (Wrzburg: Ergon Verlag, 2004). Proceedings of the
Internationales Wissenschaftsforum der Universitt Heidelberg (IWH),
Heidelberg, 22-25 May 2002. Elizabeth's presentation of our first draft at
Heidelberg in May 2002 also heralded renewed exchanges (after our long
'vacation' from Indological pursuits) with not only the German research team
but also with our Nepali (Nutan Dhar Sharma), Indian (Rana P.B. Singh) and
American (Rich Freeman) colleagues and friends. We have received far more
support from German anthropologists than from French Indologists. Elizabeth
also had the opportunity to interact there with Sandria B. Freitag (see
above).

Commissioned to write the third article of a tripartite
contribution on "Union and Unity" comparing Tantra with Kabbala, Sunthar soon
realized that juxtaposing these partial aspects of the two opposing traditions
would lead to misleading conclusions.

The spontaneous outpour of public sympathy for a larger than life "princess
of hearts" takes on a new significance in the light of the archaic sacrificial
mechanisms that surround the tragic victim, and makes an ironical contrast to
the obsequies of Mother Teresa. This newspaper-style essay suggests that ..

Elizabeth on Bhairava (the Indian Dionysos):

The original paper - short, direct and simple -
intended for the non-Indologist and those unfamiliar with our work - its
problematic, presuppositions, and fundamental insights. It offers a systematic
interpretation of the origin-myth of Bhairava, Veda - Tantra continuity,
'normalized' present-day cult, etc. You'll find it easier to keep pace with
the remaining papers on Bhairava once you've assimilated this one. There is a
Serbo-Croat version of this paper in print.

Published first in T. P. Verma, D. P. Singh, and J.
S. Mishra (eds.), Varanasi Through The Ages, (Bharatiya Itihas
Sankalan Samiti, Varanasi) pp. 231-260; and subsequently in Rana P.B. Singh
(ed.), *. This article explores the paradox of Bhairava
being simultaneously the worst criminal and the chief magistrate of the
sacred city of Varanasi, and poses the question of human vis--vis divine
justice.

This ambitious expansion of "Adepts of Bhairava in the Hindu Tradition"
was published in Alf Hiltebeitel, ed., Criminal Gods and Demon Devotees:
Essays on the Popular Guardians of Hinduism (Albany: SUNY Press, 1989),
pp. 157-229. Among its highlights are comparisons with Dionysus, Newar
ethnography, sacred and profane kingship, (re-) interpretation of
(not just) the core
structure of the Mahbhrata, socio-religious paradigm for the transition
from a 'dualistic' Vedic cosmogony to the Hindu trinity, transgression and
acculturation, etc. The original text has been
judiciously paraphrased so as to clarify, especially for the
non-Sanskritist, the play of polysemy that informs Hindu myth and ritual.

The 'structural' approach to transgressive sacrality
in ancient Greece developed in the central paragraph of this section has
been elaborated throughout this monograph and also in Sunthar's concluding
essay to Criminal Gods. On our first visit to Dumzil, Sunthar had
talked to him about the Jean-Pierre Vernant's collaboration with Madeleine
Biardeau (and Charles Malamoud) especially in deciphering the archaic
sacrifice with respect to its Greek and Vedic variants. The anthropological
germ of Georges Bataille's dialectic of transgression actually goes back to
an 'esoteric' thread in the lectures of Marcel Mauss, from whom the French
scholars have inherited the sacrificial problematic. Dumzil generously took
it upon himself to have Lvi-Strauss pass on Sunthar's Ph.D. thesis to
Vernant (or was it the other way around?), and Sunthar was able to discuss
with the latter at the Collge de France
and was also given quite a few of his books, which are referenced in
Criminal Gods. On subsequent trips to Paris, Sunthar also met with
Vernant's collaborator, Marcel Detienne, a couple of times to discuss the
latter's own contributions. Sunthar also talked over the phone with Maria
Daraki (a real Greek!), who in her own book has criticized Detienne's
interpretation of Dionysus, but was unable to meet her in person as she was
leaving the next day for Greece. The commonality between Vernant's
originally 'Marxist' (even communist, as Pierre Vidal-Naquet still seems to
be...) inspiration and Biardeau's 'Catholic' outlook is the determination to
understand culture as a totality. Detienne has been the most
'structuralist' (read: 'Lvi-Straussian') among the 'Greeks' and perhaps the
least 'ideologically' motivated. Based on Sunthar's discussions with them,
we have not encountered any valid objection to the radical, though tacit,
re-interpretation of their work in our essays. Our understanding of ancient
Greek civilization has much to gain by drawing parallel insights from the
deployment of transgressive sacrality in Indian tradition.

This section was intended as a
'tour de force' reconciling the 'Indo-European' sociologism of Dumzil's
trifunctional interpretation of the Vedic pantheon (Mitra-Varuna, Indra,
Ashvins) with the 'primitive' dualism of Kuiper's cosmogonic approach to
Vedic religion (Indra versus Varuna), but within a framework that
simultaneously accounts for the subsequent development of the Hindu trinity
(Brahm, Vishnu, Shiva + the Goddess) within Biardeau's 'anthropology' of
bhakti. The core structure of India's national epic, the Mahbhrata,
plays a key hermeneutic role in all these approaches, including our own from
the vantage point of transgressive sacrality. Elizabeth's paper on "The king
and the gardener" demonstrate how we may arrive at the same interpretation
of the Vedic-Hindu pantheon through the detailed ethnographic study even of
a single local cult.

Having read a remark by Dumzil
that the mythological insights expressed in Varuna and Vidshaka (VV)
were perhaps not irreconcilable with his own approach, Sunthar decided to
attempt a resolution of the sharp controversy that had been raging between
the French and Dutch approaches to Indian mythology. Under the pretext of
writing a review of VV for the Indo-Iranian Journal, Sunthar secured
a meeting with Dumzil at his home just a couple of days before returning to
Benares. [to be completed]

The unraveling of the mutual
imbrication of the traits of various epic heroes and Vedic-Hindu divinities
is also the occasion for deciphering the ten 'secret names' of the royal
Arjuna.

The first systematic ethnography of Pachali
Bhairava, it was presented at the Centre des tudes Indiennes in Paris to
the Nepal research team headed by Grard Toffin, and
subsequently submitted to the edition of the Purushrtha journal () entitled
Classer les dieux [Classifying the Gods]. Anglophone readers
may read "Between Veda and Tantra:Pachali Bhairava of Katmandu" instead, though it lacks the detail of
the original French version.

Originally presented on 5th Nov.
1991 by Elizabeth and Sunthar as a joint talk entitled "Between Lhasa
and Banaras: Pachali Bhairava of Katmandu (Towards an
Acculturation Model of Hindu-Buddhist Relations)" to the Harvard
Buddhist Studies Forum, this paper
is an English reworking "Le Roi et Le Jardiner" but without the same
ethnographic detail. Instead, it focuses on the dialectical Tantric
convergence of Hindu and Buddhist traditions in the course of cultural
competition between Vedic sacrifice and Buddhist renunciation. It
was due to appear since 1990 in
Roots of Tantra (eds., Robert Brown and Katherine Anne Harper).
We were informed only in 2000? by Katherine Harper that they had to drop the
paper, against their expressed wishes, as this was the precondition of SUNY
Press (without any specific reasons provided), for publishing the volume
(see the notes to "Union and Unity in Hinduism and Judaism," and previously
to "Between Mecca and Benares").

A comparison of sexual symbolism and ritual in the esoteric
traditions of Hinduism and Judaism that appeared in Hananya Goodman, ed., Between Jerusalem and Banaras: Comparative Studies in Judaism and Hinduism(Albany: SUNY, 1994), pp.195-222. Elizabeth's paper traces the Vedic -
Tantric continuity and covers topics like the sacrificer's wife, the
(internalization of) the Agnihotra (fire sacrifice), tantric 'physiology',
incest, etc. Charles Mopsik wrote the complementary chapter on the
Kabbalistic rites, and concludes with some comparative remarks on the
orthodoxy of the Kabbalistic practices.

This is the English original of the paper that was
published only in German as part of the collection of papers solicited for
the catalogue of an exhibition on Indian folk and tribal bronzes in the
Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum of the City of Cologne entitled Mrti:
Embodiment of the Divine. It looks at Shiva-Bhairava (and Vrabhadra)
from an iconographic perspective, discusses topics like Hindu-Budhist-Muslim
syncretism, and ends with some interesting reflections on aniconism,
iconoclasm and primitive stone-worship.

Le Roi et le Pilier: Ftes de Nouvel An au Npal (1992)

Review of *'s book

Presented to the conference on the Wild Goddess in South Asia in Berne / Zrich,
and subsequently published with the other papers in the volume of the same title. Covers
Ksh (the sacred city of Benares) as a goddess, pilgrimage to Vaishno Dev, and
especially the Newar New Year festivals of Indra, Pachali Bhairava, Bisket, Bhairav
Ratha Jtr. Concludes that the goddess and Bhairava ultimately constitute a single
androgynous entity.

The papers will integrate the results of our published articles on "Between
Mecca and Benares: Towards an acculturation model of Muslim-Hindu relations,"
and "Bhairava and the Goddess" (the materials on shamanism/tantrism), with
materials from our yet unpublished papers on "Between Lhasa and Benares" and
"Hindu-Muslim conflict in Benares." Though the prime focus will be
Hindu-Muslim perceptions of Benares (esp. around Lat-Bhairo/Vishvanath
temple), they will reach back into the Buddhist (Ashokan pillar/stpa)
past and Munda/Tibeto-Burman (matsyodar cosmogony) pre-history, and
offer comparative insights into the competing religious claims over shared
sacred spaces in Jerusalem.